Ireland was an English composer and teacher of classical music. The majority of his output consists of piano miniatures and of songs with piano. His best-known works include the hymn “The Holy Boy”, a setting of the poem “Sea Fever” by John Masefield, and the motet “Greater Love Hath No Man,” a choral standard.

Life

John Ireland was born in Bowdon, near Altrincham, Cheshire, into a family of Scottish descent and some cultural distinction. His father, Alexander Ireland, a publisher and newspaper proprietor, was aged 70 at John’s birth. John was the youngest of the five children from Alexander’s second marriage (his first wife had died). His mother, Annie (née Nicholson), was 30 years younger than Alexander. She died in October 1893, when John was 14, and Alexander died the following year, when John was 15. John Ireland was described as “a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood”.

Ireland entered the Royal College of Music in 1893, studying piano with Frederic Cliffe, and organ, his second study, under Walter Parratt. From 1897 he studied composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. In 1896 Ireland was appointed sub-organist at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London SW1, and later, from 1904 until 1926, was organist and choirmaster at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea.

Ireland began to make his name in the early 1900s as a composer of songs and chamber music. His Violin Sonata No. 1 of 1909 won first prize in an international competition organised by the well-known patron of chamber music W. W. Cobbett. Even more successful was his Violin Sonata No. 2: completed in January 1917, he submitted this to a competition organised to assist musicians in wartime. The jury included the violinist Albert Sammons and the pianist William Murdoch, who together gave the work its first performance at Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street on 6 March that year. As Ireland recalled, “It was probably the first and only occasion when a British composer was lifted from relative obscurity in a single night by a work cast in a chamber-music medium.” The work was enthusiastically reviewed, and the publisher Winthrop Rogers offered immediate publication (the first edition was sold out even before it had been processed by the printers). A subsequent performance of the Violin Sonata by Ireland and the violinist Désiré Defauw drew a packed audience to the Wigmore Hall in London.

Ireland frequently visited the Channel Islands and was inspired by the landscape. In 1912 he composed the piano piece The Island Spell (the first of the three pieces in his set Decorations) while staying on Jersey, and his set of three pieces for piano Sarnia: An Island Sequence was written there in 1940. He was evacuated from the islands just before the German invasion during World War II.

From 1923 he taught at the Royal College of Music. His pupils there included Richard Arnell, Ernest John Moeran, Benjamin Britten (who later described Ireland as possessing “a strong personality but a weak character”), composer Alan Bush, Geoffrey Bush (no relation to Alan), who subsequently edited or arranged many of Ireland’s works for publication, and Anthony Bernard.

John Ireland was a lifelong bachelor, except for a brief interlude when, in quick succession, he married, separated, and divorced. On 17 December 1926, aged 47, he married a 17-year pupil, Dorothy Phillips. This marriage was dissolved on 18 September 1928, and it is believed not to have been consummated. He took a similar interest in another young student, Helen Perkin (1909–1996), a pianist and composer, to whom he dedicated both the Piano Concerto in E-flat major and the Legend for piano and orchestra (which began life as a second concerto). She gave the premiere performance of both works,[4] but any thoughts he had for a deeper relationship with her came to nothing when she married George Mountford Adie, a disciple of George Gurdjieff, and she later moved with Adie to Australia. Subsequently, Ireland withdrew the dedications. In 1947 Ireland acquired a personal assistant and companion, Mrs Norah Kirkby, who remained with him till his death. Despite these associations with women, it is clear from his private papers that his sexual proclivities lay elsewhere and many commentators support this view.

On 10 September 1949, his 70th birthday was celebrated in a special Prom concert, at which his Piano Concerto was played by Eileen Joyce, who was also the first pianist to record the concerto, in 1942.

Ireland retired in 1953, settling in the hamlet of Rock in Sussex, where he lived in a converted windmill for the rest of his life. It was there he met the young pianist Alan Rowlands who would be Ireland’s choice to record his complete piano music.

In 1959 he declined the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

He died of heart failure aged 82 at Rock Mill in Washington, Sussex, and is buried at St. Mary the Virgin in Shipley, near his home. His epitaph reads “Many waters cannot quench love” and “One of God’s noblest works lies here.”

Music

From Stanford, Ireland inherited a thorough knowledge of the music of Beethoven, Brahms and other German classical composers, but as a young man he was also strongly influenced by Debussy and Ravel as well as by the earlier works of Stravinsky and Bartók. From these influences, he developed his own brand of “English Impressionism”, related more closely to French and Russian models than to the folk-song style then prevailing in English music.

Like most other Impressionist composers, Ireland favoured small forms and wrote neither symphonies nor operas, although his Piano Concerto is considered among his best works. His output includes some chamber music and a substantial body of piano works, including his best-known piece The Holy Boy, known in numerous arrangements. His songs to poems by A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield, Rupert Brooke and others are a valuable addition to English vocal repertoire. Due to his job at St Luke’s Church, he also wrote hymns, carols, and other sacred choral music; among choirs he is probably best known for the anthem Greater love hath no man, often sung in services that commemorate the victims of war. The hymn tune My Song Is Love Unknown is sung in churches throughout the English-speaking world, as is his Communion Service in C major.

His works have been recorded and performed by Choir of Westminster Abbey, The Choir of Wells Cathedral and many others.

He appears as pianist in a recording of his Fantasy-Sonata for Clarinet and Piano with Frederick Thurston, his Cello Sonata (1923) with cellist Antoni Sala and his Violin Sonata No. 1 (1909) with Frederick Grinke, who performed and recorded several of his chamber works. His Piano Sonatina (1926–27) and a number from his cycle Songs Sacred and Profane (1929) were dedicated to his friend the conductor and BBC music producer Edward Clark.

Ireland wrote his only film score for the 1946 Australian film The Overlanders, from which an orchestral suite was extracted posthumously by Charles Mackerras. Some of his pieces, such as the popular A Downland Suite and Themes from Julius Caesar, were completed or re-transcribed after his death by his student Geoffrey Bush.